Getting Rid of Books

The New York Times has published an article called Books You Can Live Without in which they invited some "book people" to give their thoughts on culling personal libraries.

Running out of space for books is a problem for quite a few Abbey's customers, and there is some good advice in this piece if you are facing this problem yourself.

The contribution I enjoyed the most, however, was by the novelist Joshua Ferris, author Then We Came to an End and the forthcoming The Unnamed. He opened with "Get rid of books? Are you kidding?" and closed with this: "Sometimes when I hear of a book I want, I buy it and then I put it away with every reassurance that it will be read soon, forget about it, hear about it again, buy it again, and only realize my mistake when I place it next to its twin on the bookshelf. It’s an addiction of good intentions.

Books are notes from the field, bound and domesticated, life brought into narrow focus. Get rid of a book? No way. Every one is a brick keeping the building standing. Books are my life. I leave and come back, and the books I find there tell me I’m home." Dave

World Wide Words

If you are a word-lover you really should check out World Wide Words. It's run by Michael Quinion, the author of many books on words, including Gallimaufry: A Hodgepodge of Our Vanishing Vocabulary and Why is Q Always Followed by U?.

As well as featuring losts of interesting information on all aspects of international English there are very useful reviews of word-related books, including two new books at Abbey's: The F Word and the Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary. And don't forget to sign up for the free weekly newsletter!

Elizabeth Blackburn Biography

We have just received stock of Elizabeth Blackburn and the Story of Telomeres: Deciphering the Ends of DNA, which was published in paperback this year. It tells the story of Elizabeth Blackburn's life and work and the emergence of a new field of scientific research on the specialized ends of chromosomes and the telomerase enzyme that extends them. Winning the Nobel Prize for Medicine is only the latest accolade to be bestowed on Elizabeth Blackburn and this biography offers a real insight into the tension between pure and applied science and also into the politics of science.

If you would like to learn more about telomeres you can read a Scientific American article written by Elizabeth Blackburn and her fellow Nobel Prize winner Carol Greider here.

Wonders of a Godless World

Miles Franklin-winner Andrew McGahan's new novel Wonders of a Godless World will be offically published tomorrow. Allen & Unwin have prepared a book "trailer" which you can view here.

From the people who brought you the OED...

Oxford University Press has produced the perfect companion to the Oxford English Dictionary. More than 40 years in the making, the Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary contains almost 800,000 meanings organised into more than 236,000 categories and subcategories.

It was produced by a team at the English Language Department of the University of Glasgow, and apparently one member of the team has been there from day one!

Volume 1 contains the thesaurus, which follows a unique thematic system of classification, with entries arranged in a comprehensive semantic hierarchy according to their meanings and volume 2 is the alphabetical index listing all the synonyms in Volume 1.

Stock is due in November and it will be available at the introductory price of $550 (usually $595). Click here to learn more about this superb publication and reserve your copy.

The Science Book of the Year is Announced

Richard Holmes' The Age of Wonder has been chosen as the winner of the 2009 Royal Society Prize for Science Books. We currently have the hardback in stock. The paperback is due in November.

In The Age of Wonder Richard Holmes investigates how a fascination for science swept across Britain at the end of 18th century, using the stories of the scientists involved to engage the reader. The book covers a variety of disciplines including astronomy, chemistry, botany, philosophy, and even poetry, as it explores how the science of the time evolved.

The other five shortlisted titles were:

What the Nose Knows: The Science of Scent in Everyday Life by Avery Gilbert

Bad Science by Ben Goldacre

Decoding the Heavens: Solving the Mystery of the World's First Computer by Jo Marchant

The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules our Lives by Leonard Mlodinow

Your Inner Fish: The Amazing Discovery of our 375-million-year-old Ancestor.

The Lost Symbol has been found at Abbey's

Today was the first day we were able to sell Dan Brown's new thriller The Lost Symbol. The response to this long-awaited follow-up to The Da Vinci Code has been great!

We are of course also providing a free copy of Mo Hayder's Ritual which usually sells for $21.95, as well as taking $10 off the recommended retail price of $49.95 of The Lost Symbol, so it's no wonder we are selling so many copies.

It appears that The New York Times couldn't wait to tell everyone about The Lost Symbol so they broke the worldwide embargo and published a review yesterday. You can read it here.

Our next big release is only two weeks away, on 1st October. It's The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest, the final volume in Stieg Larsson's spectacularly successful Millennium series.